This is the start of season 3 of our RV adventures around the country. So, what is season 3, and what is a season defined as anyway? Good question
For us, a season is any excursion away from our home base. We use our home base as a location to store all of our possessions (except for what we bring with us – i.e., our house) and where we come back to at least once a year to take care of “important” things like doctor appointments, etc. So, what have our prior seasons been?
- Season 0 – Our “shakedown” trip to Tyndall AFB which is about 15 miles from our house
- Season 1 – Our “maiden voyage” where we made our way through the midwest to visit friends and family (our “Friends, Family, and Food” tour!)
- Season 2 – Our trip to have our complete solar package installed and a quick visit to various Florida locations
- Season 3 – What we’re going on now.
It’s been said that your first trip out (ever, or when returning to travel after any length of time at home) should be close to home just in case you forgot something. I can emphatically endorse that idea. We needed to return home a couple of days after we made it to our camp site at Hardridge Army Corps of Engineer (COE) campground to pick up a few things we had forgot. The only problem was the campground was about 150 miles from home so that made for a long 300 mile day. A few days before we left for our next campground location, we needed to make yet another trip back to the house to pick up the charger for my watch so we ended up doing a load of laundry and I washed the truck while we were there. Plus I remembered to turn off the water to the house this time when we left. Now I think we’re really ready to begin/continue this trip.
Hardridge campground is a rather typical COE campground with partial hookups (water and electric) but it does have a dump station so you can empty your waste tanks. It has a typical 14-day stay limit though we were only able to stay 11 days because reservations weren’t available over Memorial Day weekend.
Trying to find a place to stay over Memorial Day weekend was a daunting task. It seemed like every place I looked at along our route to the north was already booked. I ended up finding a place in the opposite direction but just a few miles away. It wasn’t much but it would do for the weekend. As fate would have it, I somehow managed to break my glasses right at the nose bridge and I was going to need to get those replaced before I went any further. And of course my eye doctor was closed over the weekend.
Stay tuned for more nightmares…
In the meantime, here are a few images I managed to capture around the area:
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